Rather than viewing other BI pure-plays as its main competitors, the vendor increasingly sees Microsoft as its rival for midmarket customers' loyalty and is trying to differentiate its offerings accordingly.

Crystal Decisions Professional Edition, which debuted Tuesday, follows the February release of a Standard version of the suite aimed at users with no previous experience with BI software. The Professional version builds on the Standard Edition, adding data integration so that users can extract information from a variety of databases, including Microsoft's SQL Server, IBM's DB2, and databases from Oracle, Sybase, and Ingres.

Still to come is the third member of the family, Crystal Decisions Premium Edition, due out in the fourth quarter. The Premium release will also include performance management functions such as score cards, metrics, and goals, according to Todd Rowe, vice president of worldwide midmarket business at Business Objects.

"We took a stair-step approach in adding functionality" when designing midmarket versions of the company's enterprise BI software, Rowe said. All offerings share the same code set so that a midmarket user has the ability to upgrade to the enterprise software.

The midmarket offerings are focused on simplicity, integration, and aggressive price points, he added. Business Objects has added wizards, prebuilt templates, reports, and data marts for users who are migrating to their first BI software from simple spreadsheet applications. The vendor has also spent time creating integrated suites since, unlike enterprise users, midmarket customers don't tend to have employees who work on tying together individual BI modules. The midmarket products sell from the low tens of thousands of U.S. dollars compared to $100,000 to $150,000 for enterprise versions.

Business Objects defines midmarket companies as those reporting less than $1 billion in revenue or with less than 1,000 staff. With perhaps only 10 to 15 percent of those customers currently using BI software, Rowe said the primary competitor for Business Objects in the midmarket is market awareness. The market is also highly fragmented, with analysts estimating that 18 software vendors divide up 80 percent of the market.

"Microsoft is our primary competitor for midmarket for the medium to longer term," Rowe said. "We're no longer focusing as much on Cognos or other BI pure-plays." Business Objects is trying to differentiate itself from Microsoft by offering Crystal Decisions not only on Windows but on two flavors of Linux: Red Hat and Suse. The company also believes it's ahead of the game in providing the Professional version that includes BI and data integration in a single product.

Pricing for Crystal Decisions Professional Edition starts from $35,000 in North America for five concurrent users on a single Windows or Linux server. Pricing elsewhere in the world will vary according to local market conditions. The software is available in 12 languages: English, French, Spanish, German, Italian, Portuguese, Dutch, Swedish, Japanese, Korean, Simplified Chinese, and Traditional Chinese.